People that call wood burners dirty / polluting / not green are ignorant

[Sazzas]

With a modern stove that is DEFRA approved it reburns the smoke so hardly any smoke comes out of the chimney. Also as apose to gas or oil powered heating its far greener, less environment impact and local. My wood all comes from down the road from a responsibility managed forest and by buying it I'm promoting more of the land to be converted into forestry.

Its by far the cleanest, greenest and most sustainable way to heat my home

Burning wood is carbon neutral. It releases back the carbon that has been locked away. No more, no less.

It becomes less environmentally friendly when you add in transportation/processing etc. but in general is environmentally friendly and is sustainable if we put the effort in to making it so. Of course if people are burning more wood we need to plant more trees to meet that demand. Win win particularly since coal and oil reserves are rapidly depleting.

Our whole house is heated (including water) by a very large log gasification furnace. Our house is big (seven beds). It's not low effort, I have just spent half an hour starting the fire and loading it up. We spent yesterday stacking wood in the woodshed. You need space to store the wood and in order to make use of the rhi payments you must either self supply your wood from your own woodland as we do, or buy from a registered supplier (new rule from October - which means wood pellet prices in particular are likely to go up).

Sazzas, I'd love to have a wood-burner. But it will cost thousands (I got quotes a few years ago) to line our 200+ year old chimney, the walls are 18 inches thick so we can't just punch a hole in one of them, and then there'd be installation costs etc. We simply don't have that money and on DLA as I am, we ain't gonna ever have it.

We can't afford solar either - looked into it when we moved in.

We don't have a++ appliances either. I saved like a nutjob for 3 months so I could buy a kettle which was a bit better that the 6 pound jobs we usually have, which die in less than a year. The new kettle cost 30 quid.

What do we do?

I think we should go as nuclear as we possibly can.

But that's the thing though isn't it. The burning of oil, coal and gas also releases the stored carbon that has been locked away inside. The difference is that trees can be replanted and are renewable. Coal, oil and gas take millions of years to be created and so once its gone we (or our children/grandchildren) are screwed. Burning wood is infinitely better for the environment than burning coal oil or gas.

The forestry commission see the term "carbon lean" rather than carbon neutral since most people incur some transportation costs when using wood. We are all being urged to consider switching. Relatively few people have (mainly farms and rural properties). At the moment the RHI payments are likely to cover all installation costs plus the cost of fuel for a good few years. By installing our log gasification system we will actually have made money (but only because we have our own woodland and I'm pretty handy with the log splitting machine)

use the term

High density fully occupied urban housing with an integrated public transport network is green. Living with a forest for your backyard is highly desirable but land and resource intensive.

Solar and wind are fantastic solutions, except for the storage issue and the 'not in my backyard' issue. A poster up the thread said people would fight a nuclear power station far harder than they would solar/onshore wind sites - not true, as new nuclear power stations are only being planned on sites already being used for the purpose, and utility scale solar power stations need a lot of land and tend to be dotted around the countryside, so a lot more people are directly affected by them (i.e. the can see them). In fact, solar power subsidies are being phased out by the (Tory) government precisely because of this issue.

Assuming no nimbys, storage is still a major problem - even if we covered the country in enough solar and wind power plants to meet all our electricity needs when it's windy and sunny, we'd still have no electricity to use when it's still and cloudy. That's why we need an effective baseload source of power such as nuclear.

Now, I know people are nervous about nuclear power but it's honestly a bajillion times safer than it used to be - you can fly a jumbo jet into one of these newfangled reactors and nothing would happen. There is PLENTY of uranium left in the world and as for the waste, yes that's an issue but stored carefully it can be completely harmless.

I really, really can't see a better solution in the medium term.

"living with a forest for a backyard" is no less green than living in a tower block. My family is four people. We are using less of the world's resources than if we lived in a tower block and were forced to heat our home using gas. We use our own fallen trees and replant.

We have more space per head admittedly but how exactly is that less green?

we've got one and a lot of trees, so we are self-sufficient for it IF we work and plan ahead. On an industrial scale biomass is NOT 'green'.

bring on the nuclear power station and solar panels; you can put those at the end of my garden if you like. Not a useless wind turbine, though; the subsidies are ending and gosh, look what is happening...

So what would the conservation project done with all the wood it generates? It doesn't have room to leave piles and piles. The storm falls couldn't be left blocking the paths. The council would have had to transport them somewhere and again piled up.

"
Now, I know people are nervous about nuclear power but it's honestly a bajillion times safer than it used to be - you can fly a jumbo jet into one of these newfangled reactors and nothing would happen. There is PLENTY of uranium left in the world and as for the waste, yes that's an issue but stored carefully it can be completely harmless."

There is one word ...

Fukushima

Solar panels can go on the roofs of buildings. I agree that wind turbines are unslightly but possibly wind turbines can be put out to sea where there is lots of wind and few people can see them.

Fukushima involved an earthquake, Really. Not something we have a problem with in the UK...

I think claw2 has said it all pretty much and very well.

Fukushima is an ongoing disaster that will still be with us for decades to come.

Wood burning does take a bit of work compared to a switch, but you do get a much nicer heat from it and are less likely to waste it.

Comparing the processing of wood (cutting it down and moving it locally, so virtually nothing) and the processing of oil / gas is ridiculous!

BUT we don't all have woodland we own in our backyard like some very privileged people on this thread that we can heat our 7 bedroomed house with
sometimes I wonder about how the other half on here live.
as I said upthread - I have to pay for my logs, it needs to be mature wood, I think twice or more before lighting the stove as I know it is economical to keep it burning but then I live on a fixed income and don't have my own woodland. do pick up kindling though

Our entire house runs on biomass (logs in our case.) Our boiler is 93% effective, and produces very little smoke once it's up to heat. In that respect it's at least as good as most other domestic boilers. Plus the logs come from very nearby, meaning that little energy is expended transporting them. It's cheaper by far than the LPG we used to burn, and it's not having to be sourced from trouble spots of the world. Couldn't be happier with our choice to switch. All we need to do now is get off the National Grid somehow...

duchesse install solar panels?

The point about the carbon release is the life cycle of a tree is a lot more immediate and small than the life cycle of hydro-carbons.

If we were to succeed in digging up and burning up every bit of hydro-carbon in the ground, we would be returning to carbon levels in existence when the dinosaurs trod the earth, when the vegetation was mostly giant ferns and the world was a lot hotter. If we burn a tree, we are only returning carbon that was in the atmosphere 40-50 years ago.

"Fukushima involved an earthquake, Really. Not something we have a problem with in the UK..."

hmm. In theory a large volcanic eruption in the canaries or Iceland could set off a Tsumani that could affect western Europe.

www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/aug/10/science.spain

Admitally it would be a bit far fetched, but not totally impossible. The japanese earthquake cause a Tsumani across the pacific. The reason there was no loss of life in Hawaii was that there was good warning. Waves can travel a long way.

The 2004 Tsumani killed people in several countries.

Anyway there are other nuclear disasters. Why take the risk?

Unfortunately re solar panels we have a complicated roof and a lot trees around the garden. We already have solar tubes which heat/ preheat the hot water year round. Also most of the time you can't store electricity (although my friend mentioned Tesla batteries recently, which intrigue me greatly).

But duchesse, releasing trapped carbon leads to global warming. 'Carbon neutral' doesn't mean damage-free.